2021 Policy Council Voting Guidelines and Nominees

Vice President Nominees

One will be elected; serves a 2-year term; there are two Vice Presidents on APPAM's Executive Committee and Policy Council, serving staggered terms. 

Cynthia Osborne, University of Texas 

I am thrilled to be nominated for the role of Vice President of the APPAM Policy Council. I have been a member of APPAM for over 15 years, beginning when I was a doctoral student at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Nearly every year since then I have presented, organized, and/or discussed on a panel at the annual meeting. I value the annual meetings as an opportunity to reconnect with colleagues and engage in conversations on emerging scholarship that impacts public policy. I joined the APPAM Policy Council in 2013, and I have served on the strategic planning preparation committee and nominating committee, and I have chaired the policy relevance, professional development, and membership committees. I value the commitment the organization has to advancing the work of public policy scholars and practitioners and improving the research and learning experience of practitioners, faculty, and students.

I am the Associate Dean for Academic Strategies at the LBJ School at The University of Texas at Austin. At LBJ, I direct the Center for Health and Social Policy and the Child and Family Research Partnership (CFRP), which I founded in 2011. CHASP is our school’s home for social policy and specializes in research and collaborations that address social and economic disparities in the US and abroad. CFRP conducts large-scale evaluations of state and national programs, and provides research and consultation to state agencies and large nonprofit organizations in the areas of early childhood, family strengthening, fatherhood, child welfare, and teen pregnancy prevention. I also recently launched the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center at LBJ, which provides states with direction on the most effective policies that create the conditions that allow children to get off to a healthy start. As the Vice President of the Policy Council, I hope to continue to advance APPAM’s mission and contribute to the leadership of the organization in any way I am needed. In my time on the Policy Council, I have paid particular attention to how we can attract and retain students in APPAM and how we can build stronger skills in translating the important policy implications of our collective work.

Lucie Schmidt, Williams College

I am honored to be nominated for APPAM Vice-President.  In my work, I’m most passionate about two things – producing policy-relevant research, and creating opportunities for a diverse group of students to study and work on policy issues.  APPAM provides me and so many others with an intellectual home and source of support for both of these activities.

I’ve been an active member of APPAM for eighteen years, and I greatly value the multidisciplinary nature of the organization.  I was an elected member of the Policy Council from 2013-2017.  During that time, I served on the Conferences Committee and chaired the Dissertation Prize Committee for several years.  I’m most proud of the work we did during my year on the Diversity Committee, when we created the APPAM Equity and Inclusion Fellowship.  Most recently, I was selected by the Policy Council to serve on the 2019 APPAM Code of Conduct committee.  I participate regularly in the Fall Research Conference, and have also been a regular reviewer for the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

I currently serve as the John J. Gibson Professor of Economics at Williams College.  I work on policy-related issues in labor, health, and the economics of the family, and I have written extensively on social insurance programs in the United States, with a particular focus on policies for individuals with disabilities.  I am a Co-editor of the Review of the Economics of the Household and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  I recently spent two years living in the UK, directing the Williams College study abroad program in Oxford, and enjoyed the opportunity to communicate and collaborate with those working on social policy in Europe.   At Williams, I have been actively involved in efforts to improve diversity and inclusion in the Economics major.

In addition to my policy research interests, I have strong interests in policy education.  While in graduate school, I taught in the Public Policy and International Affairs (PPIA) summer program.  This experience instilled in me a desire to teach and support the next generation of policy scholars.  If elected, I would be excited to work on APPAM’s terrific efforts to ensure diversity and inclusion.  However, this work has largely been focused on graduate students.  I would also represent the many APPAM members doing policy research and education in institutions that don’t teach graduate students.  Finding ways to encourage policy education among a diverse group of undergraduates seems like a critical first step in expanding the pipeline of future policy scholars.

Treasurer Nominee

One will be elected; serves a 2-year term.

Ken Couch, University of Connecticut

I’m honored to have been nominated to serve as Treasurer of APPAM at such a difficult time.  I have a thorough understanding of the operations of APPAM and have made significant service contributions to the organization.  For 10 years, I served in different editorial positions at the Journal of Policy of Analysis and Management including four years recently as Editor-in-Chief.  During the time I was Editor-in-Chief, I bore the primary responsibility for operation of the journal and participated in all Executive Committee and Policy Council meetings of APPAM in an ex officio capacity.  The discussions in those meetings included both the Association budget and financial management.  I’ve additionally chaired publication committees, served on a strategic planning committee, and participated in conference committees for APPAM.  So, I would bring a well-informed perspective regarding the Association and its finances to the role of Treasurer.

In my current position as Director of Graduate Studies for the Economics Department at the University of Connecticut, I am involved in budgeting and staffing decisions for a Ph.D. program with more than 30 funded students.  As COVID-19 has impacted the nation, I’ve been involved in thinking through the consequences of the disruptions on our revenue streams and how to maintain operations through this adversity.  I also have been active in raising grants for many years and managing research staff.  These general experiences with budgeting, staffing and adaptation to circumstances during the pandemic should prove to be useful to the Association

 

Molly Irwin, Pew Charitable Trusts

I am honored to be nominated to serve as APPAM Treasurer and be part of the Executive Committee.  I have been an APPAM member for many, many years.  Participating in the annual conference is always a highlight of my year and having the opportunity to learn from and contribute to this organization and its members is a pleasure and honor. I have served on the APPAM Policy Council for the last four years. As part of the policy council, I have chaired the policy relevance committee and I have served on the communications and nominating committees.

APPAM’s mission of improving public policy and management by fostering excellence in research, analysis, and education is close to my heart.  A central theme in my career, and a common denominator in all of my professional roles, has been an emphasis on research and policy development, and the intersection between the two.  I am currently the vice president for research and science at the Pew Charitable Trusts working to fund and produce rigorous, useful research, and tasked with helping to advance research quality and expertise across the institution.   Most of my career has been in the public sector.  Before joining Pew, I spent more than 10 years in Federal government, most recently as the chief evaluation officer for the U.S. Department of Labor. I’ve also led research projects and initiatives in local and state government, the private sector, and academia.

I am eager to continue my engagement in the APPAM leadership. I am very excited about and committed to APPAM’s efforts to incorporate new voices into the discussion and to diversify who we engage.  And I’m especially interested in the role APPAM can play in helping to better connect research and decision-making including creative ways to bring together and strengthen the relationships between the researcher community and stakeholders—policy-makers, practitioners, community members, and funders—so we can better define research needs and build evidence that is useful and used.

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Researchers in an Academic Setting

One will be elected for a 4-year term.

Paul Baker, Georgia Tech

Currently I am a Principal Research Scientist, and the Senior Director of Research and Innovation at the Center for Advanced Communication Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. While the field of public policy, writ broadly, is relatively well established in academic settings, I believe that the area of applied policy research could benefit from increased attention. The insights generated by observing the COVID-19 pandemic have underscored the importance of wider policy perspectives, and the need to develop more effective tools for bridging sciences, and technology development and innovation with societal needs.

Further, a need for greater acknowledgment of the applied and translational side of public policy has become apparent to me in conversations with a number of academic faculty members at research universities, both domestically as well as internationally. Not all policy research is conducted in academic instructional settings and I believe it is important to recognize that the work of policy researchers especially in science and technological fields is too often overlooked and insufficiently recognized. APPAM could easily step into the gap, and be on the forefront of new collaborative initiatives with industry, as well as multidisciplinary networks of innovation.

Much of my work relates to network activities, along a number of dimensions – social, diffusion of knowledge and in terms of innovation. This is where I see APPAM particularly standing out, a perspective that goes beyond the analytic and prescriptive, to be translational, proactive and innovative in its ability to communicate the power of policy analysis as positive social force. The subject matter that I work with, workforce development, the impact of social media on community activities, technological innovation, and access and barrier mitigation for people with disabilities and the aging, are critical issues of concern in a rapidly changing society. And, having been raised in a Latino-American family, I have seen first-hand the importance of recognizing multiple cultural perspectives on policy.

Organizationally, I have served on several national boards in a policy- related capacity including NARRTC (formerly, the National Association of Rehabilitation Research and Training Centers), and as Chair, Government Affairs Committee for the Rehabilitation Engineering Society of North America (RESNA). Currently, I am the Chair for Research Council 11 (Science and Politics) of the International Political Science Association.

If elected, I will draw upon my experience working across a number of disciplinary, institutional, and ideological barriers to help enhance the public perception of policy research and analysis. For instance, increasing the inclusion of vulnerable populations such a people with disabilities, in policy development is a key was to bridge the gaps between policy, and practice, as well as between industry, the academy and the public sector. I am convinced that APPAM is well positioned to help to bridge these gaps and I look forward to helping devise new and innovative approaches to effective policymaking.

W. David Bradford, University of Georgia

It is an honor to be considered for the APPAM Policy Council. I am a health economist and the George D. Busbee Chair in Public Policy in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia.  Prior to joining UGA, I was the Director and founder of the Center for Health Economic and Policy Studies at the Medical University of South Carolina, have been a visiting faculty member at Yale Medical School and a tenured faculty member in the Department of Economics at the University of New Hampshire. With respect to research, my passion lies specifically in health policy. From questions about substance use policy, pharmaceutical policy, or housing instability, I seek to contribute to the academic and applied/practitioner literature broadly.  These days, nearly all of my research is collaborative and often multidisciplinary. I have devoted a significant portion of my recent research efforts toward understanding the impact of cannabis policies on health behaviors and outcomes. My coauthors and I are often focused on measuring the association between medical and recreational cannabis laws and prescription drug use in Medicare and Medicaid - with a particular emphasis on opioid use and misuse.  More generally the contribution my research has made to science involves understanding the impact of drug and risky behavior policies and the role of incentives on individual behaviors.  I tend to study many types of risky behavior, encompassing such traditional categories as substance use and risky sexual behaviors alongside less typical categorizations like failing to vaccinate children.  I also have a long-standing interest in understanding the role of time preferences on health behaviors.  This includes several projects that assess the time preferences of individuals and determines the effect of those preferences on the demand for preventative health care, general health utilization, and other health care-related decisions. My third general area of academic interest involves research into the U.S. pharmaceutical industry.  This includes projects on off-label prescribing, the impact of direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription pharmaceuticals, the impact of various information sources and financial incentives on pharmaceutical use.

My time on the APPAM Policy Council would represent an opportunity to continue the sorts of service to my professional community at large that I have found so rewarding in the past.  In addition to serving as the Co-Editor for Health Economics, I have also had the pleasure of serving on the oversight boards of two annual conferences (the Annual Health Economics Conference and the Southeastern Health Economics Study Group) and in the past have served several stints on the Board of Directors of the International Health Economics Association.  Over the past decade, as my research interests - and the interests of my students - have evolved to a more purely policy orientation I have benefitted greatly from APPAM and the network of collaborators it supports.  I would very much welcome the opportunity to give back to the Association in a tangible way as a member of the Policy Council.

Sanya Carley, Indiana University, SPEA

It is an honor to be considered for the position of council member. I have been a proud and devoted member of APPAM for approximately 13 years. I am a Paul H. O’Neill Professor and Director of the Master of Public Affairs program at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. My research focuses on energy justice, electricity and transportation policies, and public perceptions of emerging energy technologies.

Through the years, I have served as an APPAM Treasurer, a member and chair of conference program committees, a mentor to junior scholars, a poster judge, and a webinar participant. As Treasurer, a role that I have served over the past two years, I have helped manage the Association’s investments and annual expenditures, and served on the Executive Committee. I have also served JPAM as a managing editor and a currently as a co-editor. Through my years of engagement with APPAM, I especially appreciate its emphasis on high quality research and practice. I also value the integration between academic and practitioner perspectives; the Association’s devotions and continual self-reflection on diversity, equity, and inclusion; and the importance it places on evidence-based policymaking, no matter the sub-discipline. As a council member, I will continue to foster such quality of inquiry and integration of perspectives.

Lisa Gennetian, Duke University

More than 20 years ago, I was entrusted to unveil findings from the Minnesota Family Investment Program evaluation at APPAM. I have vivid memories of a packed room, and Howard Rolston, then director of the Office of Planning Research and Evaluation, standing in my line of sight. In that era of welfare reform, the findings were unprecedented: work, income and marriage increased among single mothers and children did better. I have been an active member since this formative first experience. What a privilege to be on this year’s slate nominated to serve on APPAM’s policy council!

The core of my research is to understand the lives of families and children in poverty and the policies intended to support them. Over the years, as I’ve straddled policy research in the private and academic sector, my wide and varied experiences and resulting policy work have always had a home at APPAM.

What I appreciate now is the unique role APPAM plays as a research and policy community to support scholarship and policy as it impacts children’s well-being; a theme of my work as issues as varied as the environment, health care, education and prison reform, and the caregiving workforce that matter for policy are not distinct from what matters for children.

As a first-generation scholar, and a career juggling disciplinary boundaries, APPAM welcomed me. I would be honored to join a leadership team to extend this welcome and to support APPAM  as an incubator of innovation with the responsibility of inclusion and marshalling APPAM’s platform to reverse systemic racism and exclusion.  My hope is that the disciplinary diversity of my own scholarship and the good fortune of my collaborations across academic and nonacademic sectors is a strength that I can bring to catalyze positive change.

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Researchers in an Academic Setting, Early Career

One will be elected for a 4-year term.

Jason Coupet, North Carolina State University

Like many, my first connections to APPAM were through the Annual Conference, but those connections were deeply transformative for me. My PhD is in Management, and I discovered APPAM through a Google Search (quite literally) and attended my first annual conference very late in my graduate school career. At my first conference, I felt like a kid in a candy store. As I bounced from session to session, Everyone I met was friendly, supportive, and committed to the rigorous study of social science for public good. I got hooked. As an interdisciplinary public scholar, APPAM was the primary vehicle I used to find my intellectual home.

Just as importantly for me, as a researcher of color, I’ve always found APPAM to be welcoming to scholars (particularly junior schools) from many different walks of life. Many different academic associations have diversity and inclusion programming, but diversity is embedded at APPAM much more organically. Its evident in the scholarship! I’ve connected with Hispanic economists at the frontiers of immigration research, brilliant women leading environmental policy discourse, and African-American public health scholars with brilliant research designs. When the students I work with, particularly emerging students of color and first generation, ask about finding an academic home, I quickly send them to APPAM. There are few policy research institutions I can think of that a are this welcoming, fun, and committed to rigorous and relevant research.

I am an active APPAM mentor, and I am most excited about continuing to build out the traditions that connect students to transformative policy research. As students from marginalized backgrounds increasingly become connected to the issues in their communities, APPAM has great potential to serve as a conduit connecting emerging students passionate about policy to the research that can help build the communities and societies that work better for our most marginalized communities.

I am an Associate Professor of Public Administration in the School of Public and International Affairs at North Carolina State University. My own research applies political economy (institutional economics and economic organization) to the study of the public service delivery. My work has mostly involved the efficiency and performance of public service organizations and has been in four major policy domains: nonprofit policy and management, transportation policy and management, science and technology policy, and the applied political economy of organizations. My research has appeared in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Public Performance & Management Review, Business Strategy & the Environment, Administration & Society, and Nonprofit Management & Leadership, among others. I have been funded by the Sloan Foundation, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, and the North Carolina Department of Transportation.

Daniel Fay, Florida State University

I am thrilled and honored to be nominated to be a member of the APPAM Policy Council.  I am an associate professor in the Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University. At the Askew School, I direct the Ph.D. Program and serve as inaugural co-director of  the Social Justice and Innovation research lab (SJI). Our school created the SJI in the summer of 2020 as an interdisciplinary research incubator for students, faculty, and government officials engaged in social justice inquiry.  SJI operates at  the intersection of public policy and management to examine systems that generate and reinforce inequities between groups and produces theoretical and practical recommendations to promote social justice. I have been a member of APPAM for almost 10 years, beginning when I was a doctoral student at the University of Georgia.  Nearly every year since then, I have presented and/or discussed on a panel at the annual meetings.  In 2018, I was honored by APPAM as a recipient of the “40 for 40 Fellowship”.  APPAM’s mission to advancing theoretical and practical research in policy and management is the reason I joined the organization as a student.  I continue to participate and encourage my students to join this esteemed association based on its commitment to diversity and inclusion.  As a member of the Policy Council, I hope to advance APPAM’s mission of improving public policy and management with particular attention to the intersection of policy and management and advancing diversity and inclusion within the organization.  I thank you for your consideration and wish for good health for all APPAM members during these troubling times.

S. Michael Gaddis, University of California, Los Angeles

I am an assistant professor of sociology and a faculty affiliate at the California Center for Population Research (CCPR) at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). My research interests include race and ethnicity, inequality, education policy, and mental health. APPAM has made a significant impact on my career to date as the conferences have allowed me to network beyond my discipline and present my work to a larger and more diverse audience. I first became an APPAM member in 2010 as a young graduate student and have attended the fall conferences yearly, presented my research, and organized sessions. I have attended multiple pre-conference workshops at APPAM that have been exciting and informative. I enjoy the interdisciplinary aspect of APPAM and feel it is the most important organization I hold membership in. I would like to support the organization by volunteering to serve on the policy council. My initial ideas to help improve and build this great organization encompass two themes. First, while APPAM does a great job to create an inclusive environment for young scholars, I believe more can be done to be sure that we reach out to a more diverse set of scholars on the dimensions of race, gender, and institutional affiliation. Second, I believe that APPAM can do more to bridge the gap between academics, professionals, and policymakers through workshops, training, research briefs, and networking events. I hope that I can increase the reach and value of APPAM by contributing to these and other issues of importance.

Oded Gurantz, University of Missouri

I am an Assistant Professor in the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri. My research examines higher education access and completion, primarily using experimental and quasi-experimental designs to examine programs and policies that are effective in ameliorating educational disparities. A key component of my research agenda is the development of long-term, collaborative partnerships with educational and government agencies. I believe this approach helps findings address not just theoretical questions in the literature, but ensures that the results are relevant to current public policy debates and well-positioned to lead to actionable change. If elected to APPAM’s Policy Council I plan to work on increasing the visibility of academic research to a broader non-academic audience.

Nicola Ulibarri, University of California, Irvine

I am an assistant professor in Urban Planning & Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine, working in the area of environmental policy and governance. I am a Hispanic female, and have used the shared experience of own and my URM network to recruit and support diverse voices in the academic and policy worlds. My own success in navigating graduate school and landing a fulfilling career hinged on support and inspiration from diverse advocates and mentors. Additionally, having trained in an interdisciplinary environmental PhD at a non-member school, I know the feeling of being an “outsider” at APPAM events. I previously served on an advisory board for the NSF-sponsored California Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP), a consortium working to improve numbers of underrepresented minority faculty; there, I learned a lot about the best practices and challenges of making organizations inclusive. I have also played numerous small roles helping support equity and inclusion on my campus, which is a Minority Serving Institution, and as a board member for nonprofit organizations. As an APPAM policy council member, I would be excited to draw on my personal experience, my mentorship of undergraduate, masters, and PhD students, and my learning through the evidence-based AGEP program to help the organization advance its diversity and equity programming. Specifically, I would be excited to help advance APPAM’s initiatives to 1) get diverse students interested in policy graduate programs, 2) attract and retain environmental scientists in the society, and 3) support underrepresented people and perspectives in APPAM’s programming.

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Nominees in a Non-Academic Setting

 

One will be elected for a 4-year term.

Aixa Cintron-Velez, Russell Sage Foundation

I am honored to be nominated for the APPAM Policy Council.  APPAM is the preeminent professional organization bringing together policy makers, practitioners and scholars for the enhancement of public policy.  Throughout my career –from my student years to the present—I have benefitted from membership in this community.  And I now appreciate the opportunity to give back.  To have the opportunity to serve on the Council at a time when the nation simultaneously grapples with a major public health emergency, and economic recession, and stark evidence of pervasive racial discrimination is both a privilege and a responsibility that I take seriously.

APPAM has a distinct role to play:  providing timely relevant evidence to better understand these inter-connected issues and ensuring that lawmakers and the larger public have access to the science and facts that they need in order to make informed decisions.  To effectively accomplish its mission, APPAM also has the responsibility to build a more diverse and inclusive professional organization, where both rigorous social science and meaningful representation of different perspectives not only co-exist but also thrive.  If elected, I aim to advance this agenda.

My research and work experience make me particularly well-suited to serve APPAM.  As a Program Director at the Russell Sage Foundation, I oversee the Foundation’s research programs on the Future of Work and on Race, Ethnicity and Immigration.  This has given me an invaluable point of entry into an important set of issues that are core to APPAM’s mission, from the benefits of a comparative, cross-national lens for understanding low-wage work in the U.S. to realizing empirical blind spots in studying contemporary migration, racial bias and discrimination.  Leading such diverse programs has also afforded many occasions to forge innovative and inter-disciplinary partnerships with academics, researchers, and policy makers –a skillset that I would bring to the broader APPAM community.

Work at RSF has also given me the opportunity to partake in efforts to increase diversity, equity and inclusion in a variety of settings, including serving on the Advisory Council to CUNY’s Guttman Community College, the Board of the New York Research Data Center, the Funders’ Learning Community to Reduce Ethnic and Racial Disparities in Funding and Career Advancement, and the Sloan Research Network on Outsourcing.

Having previously worked as a civil servant, an academic, and as a non-profit manager, I have experienced the benefits of collaborating across disciplines, methods, substantive areas of interest, and places of practice, which makes APPAM a natural intellectual home for me.  If elected, I would work to ensure that APPAM is an intellectual home for all of its members, one that draws on its diversity to advance rigorous research, education and training in order to address the morally urgent social issues of our time.

Scott Cody, Insight Policy Research 

We are at an exciting juncture for public policy research—one in which rapid methodological advances hold the promise for more accurate and more actionable evidence. I am honored to be nominated to APPAM’s Policy Council and would be excited to help APPAM and its members explore and refine these methods.

High quality methods are the thread that connects APPAM’s diverse membership. Recent methodological developments are improving research quality and changing practice. New machine learning approaches may allow researchers to strengthen impact evaluations by improving statistical precision and reducing bias. Program improvement methods infused into evaluations can uncover operational changes that help programs have greater impact. The adoption of Bayesian statistical methods can both improve the accuracy of research and allow us to present results in ways policymakers can digest.

As Senior Vice President at Insight Policy Research, I am helping government agencies incorporate these methods into research activities. Over my 30-year career, I’ve always sought to apply t best methods to help policymakers make sound decisions. I’ve designed program evaluations to measure impact, rapid learning studies to test improvement strategies, microsimulation models to predict the effects of policy changes, evidence standards for systematic reviews, and research-informed practice guides for program staff. I have worked with more than a dozen federal agencies, examining programs like SNAP, TANF, WIC, K-12 education, workforce development, healthcare quality, responsible fatherhood training, housing, and child welfare.

I believe new methodological advances can improve evaluation and bridge the all-too-frequent gap between policy research and program operations. But to be effective, these methods will first require careful consideration. The research community must continue testing and refining methods, developing standards of practice, and sharing lessons. APPAM is perfectly suited to facilitate the conversation around these methods, and I would be excited to engage in this conversation as a member of APPAM’s Policy Council.

Raymond Foxworth, First Nations Development Institute

I am extremely honored to be nominated for the APPAM Policy Council. I am so thankful to have found an extremely supportive community of scholars and practitioners at APPAM dedicated to fostering excellence in research, education and analysis.

Currently, I serve as Vice President of First Nations Development Institute (First Nations), a national Native American-led nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting economic and community development in Native American communities. First Nations invests in the genius and ingenuity of Native people as they look to combat systemic issues in their local communities. Our work at First Nations has always been dedicated to combating oppressive policies at all levels that restrict the inherent rights of Native nations to govern, control and lead local development efforts in their communities. Moreover, our work is explicitly aimed at strengthening the third sector in Native communities and creating policies to enable local development that is compatible with Native community values and worldviews.

In 2019, I was thrilled to attend the first ever Indigenous APPAM, organized by Laura Evans and Cheryl Ellenwood in Denver, CO. The Indigenous APPAM community has focused on linking researchers and practitioners in support of Indigenous scholars and scholarship. Indigenous APPAM has been a great source of support and collaboration for like-minded policy scholars. This gathering demonstrated to me that APPAM is a values-based organization looking to create a more open and diverse network of individuals. If elected to the APPAM Policy Council, I will continue to help further the mission and values of APPAM and work to advance the diversity and inclusion of APPAM.

Diana McCallum, Mathematica

I am honored to be nominated for the APPAM Policy Council. I am a Director of Research and Evaluation for Mathematica’s Children, Youth, and Families division. My topical expertise includes family engagement in education, teen pregnancy prevention, social safety net programs for families and individuals, and educational choice. My current work centers on identifying the core components that are linked to program effectiveness, providing evaluation technical assistance to organizations, and encouraging the use of evidence to drive decision making. I have worked closely with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to launch the Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse, which assesses the existing evidence for employment focused programs designed to improve labor market outcomes for individuals with low incomes.  In addition, I explore ways that we can apply an equity focused lens to both research and organizational processes to better incorporate the voices and needs of underrepresented groups. As a Director at Mathematica, I also focus on mentoring, recruitment, and fostering career development for staff.  I have a PhD in Developmental Psychology and a certificate in education policy from Duke University.

I started my career in public policy as a Society for Research in Child Development Policy Fellow in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at HHS. I worked with teams to launch the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Evidence Review and think critically about ways to leverage systematic reviews to identify interventions supported by high quality, credible evidence. I have also worked at the U.S. Department of Education, overseeing the What Works Clearinghouse.

I hope that APPAM will become an organization that embraces researchers from a range of identities, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and lived experiences.  APPAM has been committed to connecting researchers across disciplines with practitioners and policymakers, a distinguishing feature that already attracts a diverse audience. APPAM has the potential to become a hub for sharing innovations for a new generation of researchers. In the future, I would like to see APPAM become the professional home for understanding how we can actively consider issues of equity and inclusion as we strive to improve public policy and management.

Margaret Taylor, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

I am honored to be nominated for the APPAM Policy Council position as a researcher in a non-academic setting. By way of introduction, my work advances human and organizational decision-making related to the invention, adoption, and diffusion of technologies that reduce climate change emissions and impacts. I have an interdisciplinary background that bridges the social sciences, the environmental sciences, and engineering, with degrees from Columbia University and Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy. I was an Assistant Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and now work just up the hill at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL, a federally-funded research and development center operated by the University of California on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy). Along the way, I’ve also worked at Stanford University’s Precourt Energy Efficiency Center, held the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in the Environment and Economy at the University of Ottawa, and served for several years as the co-Chair of the Behavior Energy Climate Change conference.

APPAM has been my professional home since I was a graduate student in the late 1990s, and I want to give back to the organization. I’ve learned through past advisory board experience (Applied Solutions; Sloan Foundation Energy and Environment Program) how important it is to be clear-headed about an organization’s challenges while staying true to its mission. I believe that APPAM and its membership will confront serious challenges over the next few years, including pandemic-related financial uncertainty in higher education and an increasingly complicated political context for rigorous policy-relevant research. APPAM has tremendous assets to build from, however, given how successfully it has worked to fulfill its mission of improving public policy and management by fostering excellence in research, analysis, and education. Chief amongst these assets is the diverse and enriching intellectual community APPAM has fostered that welcomes academic and non-academic constituencies alike. From my research perspective, I am particularly impressed by how essential the Fall Research Conference has become in building community amongst the passionate group of professionals who conduct evidence-based research to advance energy, environment, and science and technology policy.

If I am elected to serve on the Policy Council, I am particularly interested in finding new and creative ways to support APPAM’s members as professionals who juggle many competing demands every day. In addition, I want to help the APPAM membership be inventive in fostering multidisciplinary approaches to building knowledge that can be put into practice to advance the public interest.

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Institutional Member Representative

 

One will be elected for a 4-year term.

**Please note: only institutional members vote for the institutional member representative on the Policy Council.**

Heather Campbell, Claremont Graduate College

I have served as the Institutional Representatives' representative to the Policy Council before, and I hope to continue to represent and inform my colleagues and support APPAM in this way. I enjoy contributing to APPAM and also serving as a conduit between the two bodies, and I bring attention and value to the role. As just one example, at this year’s virtual APPAM research conference, I worked with a team to create, and then moderated, an Institutional Representative’s panel on the future of the MPP. I have served as an Institutional Representative for 14 years, so I’m aware of other issues that concern Institutional Members, including the fact that large and small college/university members, and professional members (such as Mathematica, Abt, MDRC, etc.) do not always have the same concerns and all need to be represented. At this time, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are of increasing focus. My research is in environmental (in)justice, which puts it directly in the DEI area. My PhD is in Public Policy Analysis, and I currently serve as the Chair of the Division of Politics and Economics, and as Field Chair for the Claremont Graduate University's lively Public Policy program, including the MAPP and the PhD field in Public Policy. APPAM is my core organizational affiliation, and I caused both my last university and my current one to become Institutional Members because of my firm belief in the importance of APPAM institutional membership for any school that is serious about its policy field. Thank you for  considering my candidacy.

Douglas Harris, Tulane University

I am professor and chair of the Department of Economics and the Schlieder Foundation Chair in Public Education at Tulane University, as well as a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. I also founded, and now direct, two research centers—the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans and the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH). As these center names suggest, my work focuses on the economics of education (both K-12 and higher education), although most of my work is interdisciplinary (with political science, psychology, public administration, sociology) and my policy interests extend to issues of poverty and the environment. Before coming to Tulane, I was Associate Professor in the LaFollette School of Public Affairs (and School of Education) at UW-Madison. (I also received my MPA from LaFollette many years before that.) Finally, I have experience in government, including advisory roles with the Obama Administration, Biden Campaign, and governors in many states.

I have been coming to APPAM almost every year for the past two decades and have always appreciated the combination of collegiality, multi-disciplinary perspectives, and rigorous, policy-focused research. I have put my name forward to give back and pay these gifts forward. As a member of the Policy Council, I could also represent a wide range of perspectives, across disciplines, topics, and research/policy/practice.

If I were selected, I would take my queue from all of you. But, as a starting point, I see at least three priorities. First, I am committed to increasing diversity within our ranks. As department chair at Tulane, I have helped create one of the most diverse economics departments in the country. This involves tackling the problem at each stage, from the recruitment of master’s and doctoral students to employment and promotion decisions. Second, I’d like to see more integration of research and policy, both in our conferences and in general. Between my centers, which are research-practice partnerships, and my advising roles in government, I have experience with this that I’d like to put to good use. (I would work with the APPAM Policy Relevance, Development and Communications Committee on this topic.) Third, I think we can do more with the international conferences. Public policy and management are not just U.S. issues.

A broader priority for the entire association, and cutting across all of the above areas, is the need to help APPAM rebound from COVID. The pandemic has created challenges from a funding standpoint, but also opened up new opportunities for broadening the ways in which we engage with one another and with policymakers.

Shazia Miller, NORC at University of Chicago

I am deeply committed to the mission of APPAM of improving public policy and management. I have spent my entire professional career working in research organizations dedicated to providing reliable, trustworthy information that supports excellence in public policy – from my first job out of college at the U.S. General Accounting Office, to the Chicago Consortium on School Research, to Chicago Public Schools, to the American Institutes for Research, to my current position at NORC at the University of Chicago. While there is broad consistency in the missions of each of these organizations, each has approached their goals in a different way which has provided me with deep insight into the ways that institutions can serve the policy community.

If elected to serve as the institutional representative of the policy board, I will bring that perspective, along with my experience as woman of color, to further APPAM’s mission. In particular, I would focus my attention on three areas. First, I will make sure that I am representing institutional members by reaching out to my fellow institutional representatives to capture their ideas about how to enhance APPAM and explore their support for existing ideas. Second, I will work with the Policy Council to move the ideas of the institutional members forward. Third, if supported by institutional member peers, I will lead an effort to further enhance the annual conference by specific efforts to include more policymakers, practitioners, and funders, to broaden out perspectives and understanding.

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